Lens Testing - Nikon 80-400vr - page 1

Non-scientific, seat-of-the-pants shots with a Nikon 80-400vr lens. Tripod mounted 80-400vr, with Really Right Stuff tripod collar and remote release. Care was taken to maximize image quality. These are a series of shots out of a D300 and a D700 camera at different F-stops to see how center sharpness varied. Converted from NEF to JPG with CaptureNX2. For more information, view the EXIF data. Images are not resized.

Note: When I took the D300 samples, the lens was probably front-focusing just a bit, and some increase in sharpness as I stopped down was due to getting better depth of field coverage. There was also some wind blowing the subject's feathers in some shots.

Sure can see dust spots when you stop down a lot... You can see why I generally shoot at F9 to F14: Lack of sharpness below that, lack of shutter speed above. My experience says "Shoot this lens at F9-F11, and no less than F8. on a D300"

The lens looks better to me on a D700. Three sets of test images were done - the first set with VR off. The second set at 1/200th shutter speed with VR on. The third set at 1/100th shutter speed with VR. All were taken with mirror-up and remote release. I shot in manual mode with auto-iso, so the images with a high F-stop number also have pretty high ISO to take into consideration.

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